Archive of Our Own

There were very few people who crawled under Commander Shepard's skin like Conrad Verner. And though his place under her skin was metaphorical, she had once worried that perhaps he intended to literally get in her skin. Really, though, Frankie assumed he was mostly harmless, just terribly annoying, and that if he was going to be an absolute weirdo and stalk someone, at least she was equipped to protect herself should he go from irritant to threat.

She doubted he was a threat to anyone but himself and his own life.

Then she kind of forgot about him after she died. More important things to worry about, and all. Remembering his simpering, "Commander Shepard," and weird attachment to her like she was a mega-pop star he had a parasocial relationship with was low on the list of priorities.

How peaceful it was to forget about him - while it lasted.

Running into him, wearing a fake of her old armor, and pretending to be a Spectre (and threatening the toughest sounding asari matriarch she'd ever met) had been an incredible stroke of terrible luck.

She really wished she hadn't been brought back to life. Staring at his irritating blond head had her longing for the sweet embrace of oblivion. Since no higher power seemed keen on striking her down with a freak indoor lightning storm, she was going to have to take things into her own hands, and she didn't mean to commit suicide.

"Alright, Conrad, you want to be me so bad?" she found herself saying before the part of her brain that was in charge of responsible thought and well-planned action had a chance to throw out a warning klaxon telling her she was about to do or say something reprehensibly stupid. "You're going with me right now, recon mission."

It was such a bad, horrible, no good idea, fueled by some mixture of extreme frustration and pity. This man was so goddamn pathetic, and he was going to get himself killed if she didn't rattle his cage a little.

Conrad Verner's crystal blue eyes lit up. His excitement turned the kicked puppy dog look he'd been wearing into one a kid who'd just been promised ice cream might wear. "Wow! Really? You mean it?"

Oh yeah, this was the stupidest fucking idea that she had ever had, bar none. And she'd had some real gems of bad ideas in her time.

"Yep," she answered through gritted teeth and a false smile. "Now, is that little pea shooter the only gun you've got?" she asked, pointing at the little pistol holstered on his hip.

She grimaced, having had to take in the entire package before her. God it was so weird seeing him in her armor. A very strange fun-house mirror.

A blond, bearded nightmare.

God, or whoever, was playing a joke on her.

"Yeah, it's the only one. You don't really think we'll need to use guns, do you?"

Frankie leveled him with a deadly serious stare. She raised her fingers to count as she spoke. "Conrad, in the last two days, I have been shot at, stabbed, and had my shit rocked by an asari commando. If you're not ready for violence, you're not ready to be like me."

Wow, okay, when she said it like that, it really made her whole ... thing sound bleak as hell. While Verner shifted uncomfortably, weighing if hanging out with the Commander Shepard was really worth it, Frankie began tabulating how many mercenaries she'd killed when she went to go talk to Samara in the first place.

The numbers painted a gruesome picture.

Stuffing that uncomfortable bit of self-reflection far, far down so she never had to think about it again, she watched as Conrad visibly gathered his courage. He pulled himself together until he was sort of standing at parade rest. She resisted the very mean urge to bark a correction at him like a drill sergeant.

"I'm ready to go when you are, Commander," he finally answered with a weak smile.

Frankie clapped him on the shoulder and pushed him towards the path to one of Nos Astra's many, many shopping districts. "First order of business, we're getting you a sniper rifle."

Commander Shepard leaned casually against the short wall meant to keep her from tumbling unceremoniously to her death from the rooftop. Loudly blowing and then popping a bubblegum bubble, she watched her newest (and temporariest) subordinate set up his new gently-used rifle to watch one of the cargo bays known to be controlled by Eclipse.

"Guess I should've asked earlier, you do at least know how to fire a gun, right?" Any dumbass could shoot, really. Guns had a pretty easy, point-and-click situation going on. It was actually pointing-and-clicking at the right thing she was worried about with Verner. If she had to explain to Chakwas that she'd been friendly-fired by Conrad, she'd just throw herself off a building much like the one she was standing on top of right now.

"Oh, yeah, I've spent a lot of time on the range and doing arena sims," he assured her as he adjusted the scope.

"And you hit the targets, right? Not the walls around them, not the range staff?" She wasn't sure she believed him.

Conrad stopped futzing with the rifle to rub his neck awkwardly. "Most of the time, yeah," he answered sheepishly. Pink began to crawl over his cheeks.

Some thoughts came naturally to her, wondering when dinner was going to be ready, or going, "Puppy!" when she saw a cute dog (or any vaguely dog shaped alien animal for that matter) for example. But some thoughts had to be sneakier, lest she block them out entirely so they could never gain purchase inside her head.

The thought that it was something approaching cute for him to blush had to actually worm itself through one of the shallower wrinkles in her brain like a disgusting, wretched ocean nematode to work around any mental blocks she set up since the first time she had that dream about Verner. It slithered up branching pathways, infiltrating the sacred space of her mind unwanted and despised.

GROSS.

The long drop from that building looked very enticing just about now.

Frankie blew and popped another bubble. He was only half as hopeless as she had assumed. And she was more than twice as hopeless as she had dreamed. "Alright, well, let's remember that if we get in a firefight, that you shoot at the assholes with yellow armor, not at the asshole with pink armor and great tits," she reminded him, hooking her thumb back at her chest.

His cheeks grew even redder.

Maybe she needed to slap him to reset her brain. Then the red would be from her hand print and she would have the satisfaction of hitting him.

"Yes, ma'am!" he enthused with a sloppy salute.

"Ugh," she groaned and blew another bubble.

"What was it like?" Conrad asked after approximately an hour of nothing interesting happening at the commercial spaceport.

"What was what like?" she responded without looking up from the celebrity gossip mag she had her nose buried in until things got good, happy to let Conrad do all the boring work of watching nothing happening for hours.

"Dying and coming back," he clarified. "It is true, right?"

Frankie dropped the mag in her lap with a groan. "Jesus Christ, you can't just ask someone that, Conrad!"

Conrad shied away from her, looking again like a kicked puppy. And leaving her feeling like the puppy kicker. "Sorry. I just ... it's ... you're-" he stuttered.

"The only person it's ever happened to. Yeah, I get it," she huffed. She rolled her eyes, but felt bad about that too for some weird and wholly unidentifiable reason. She crossed her arms and shrugged. "I dunno. Bad, I guess?"

Bad. Horrible. Painful. Fucked. Wrong. Scary. REALLY FUCKING BAD.

She really didn't want to describe dying. It was supposed to be this big unknowable thing that was the last thing you ever experienced. Unfortunately for Shepard, it was not the last thing she ever experienced.

"Did it hurt?" he ventured to ask quietly.

Frankie chewed on her lip and scowled down at the picture of a very stunning asari supermodel in her lap, wishing she was somewhere else, with an actual asari supermodel in her lap. "You know how it feels to stand too close to a fire, how the heat goes from comfortable to painful with no time to get used to it in between?"

"I think so."

"It was like that, except in me. It felt like my blood was on fire, burning me up from inside. My eyes ... fuck, maybe they ruptured, I don't remember. I just remember how fucking bad it hurt," she recounted quietly. It was the worst pain she had felt, and she relived it often, just as she was falling asleep after a hard day almost every day. "But what I remember the most was not being able to breathe. The way it felt like my chest was being crushed by a boulder. The utter fucking terror when I tried to breathe and there was just nothing there to take up space in my lungs."

Arms wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her into a hug at a strange angle so that her ear collided with Conrad's armored chest piece. The thought that he smelled nice, like a firewood pile in the summertime (something she had only had rare occasions to smell,) lingered too long in the part of her brain that wanted to like this weapons-grade doofus. The problem was that he was a weapons-grade doofus who had glommed onto her in the worst way possible, and he made her so mad that she generally wanted to shoot him in the big toe when she saw his gelled blond hair pop up every now and again in her life.

Why had she thought this was a good idea again?

Oh, that's right, she never thought it was a good idea. She was just torturing herself to make a fucking point.

"What are you doing?" she asked as he squeezed her even harder. Her cheek was now thoroughly smushed against his chest.

He inhaled deeply before releasing her from his anaconda-like grip. "You seemed like you need a hug," he explained as he took a step back.

She probably did, but like hell was she going to admit it to Conrad Verner.

Frankie raised her hand to count down her fingers as she said, "I need three things, Conrad. One: A bottle of tequila. Two: A good lay. And three: For you to watch the fucking port for any sign of Eclipse mercenaries."

"Right, sorry!" Conrad scurried back to his position behind his shitty sniper rifle.

"And Conrad?" she said as she shook her magazine once to open the pages better.

"Yeah, Shepard?"

"Don't fucking touch me again."

Conrad's gasp drew her attention before his excited "Commander Shepard, I see something!" had a chance to. The magazine fell to the ground as she practically flew to the ledge and drew her own rifle to look down the scope.

Finally, something other than regaling Verner with stories of her exploits was happening. She was running out of interesting combat stories to tell him while she was only half paying attention, and it was about to a point where all she had left was stories of her sexual exploits and that was a road she didn't want to go down with him. There were only so many ways to say, "And I sat and monitored my target for days before anything happened and it was very anticlimactic." She was about resort to elaborate lies that would definitely backfire somehow.

Sure enough, a cargo truck flew into a port dock, which was swarming with mercenaries. She watched carefully as they began offloading large crates. Shepard tapped her communicator, "EDI, can you determine which cargo dock that is from my visor's feeds?"

"Yes, Commander," EDI's made-in-a-lab-to-be pleasing voice filled her ears. "Cross-referencing feeds with available port layouts and your geo-location now."

Boom!

Frankie nearly jumped out of her skin. One of the mercenaries she had been watching through her scope fell forward and didn't get back up. "Conrad?" she inhaled.

"Yeah, Shepard?"

"Did you just shoot that merc?"

"Yes!"

Frankie was beginning to suspect that while he had the enthusiasm of a golden retriever, he also had the intelligence of an empty fucking walnut shell.

"Conrad, do you know what recon is?" she asked shrilly. She pressed the button on the side of her gun so it would fold into its stowed position. "It's information gathering, spying, Conrad!" Frankie dragged her hands down her face and then balled them up as an exasperated groan crawled out of her.

She was this close to laying hands on his aggravating, idiot head. Maybe she could just throttle him a little.

"Oh, I wasn't supposed to shoot at them yet," he eventually pieced together.

"Your grasp of the obvious is inspiring," she deadpanned and then stepped away before she gave in to the urge to ring his bell.

This was her fault. She brought a fucking amateur on an information gathering mission and now she was going to lose Samara's lead because the amateur in question was a massive fucking bonehead. Frankie buried her head in her hands. What a goddamn disaster.

"Well, what do we do now?" he asked as she began pacing like a caged animal.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Back and f-

Stop.

"Get in the car, Verner. This just became an infiltration and combat mission," she commanded and pointed at the skycar parked at the back of the roof.

"Wait, what?" he asked, hugging the sniper rifle to his chest like a beloved stuffed animal, or a security blanket.

"You wanted to be like Commander Shepard? Well, Commander Shepard's missions go tits up and she gets shot at, a lot." Frankie grabbed the small gorget of his chest plate, dragging Conrad to the skycar. Yanking the rifle from his arms and folding him down into the passenger seat, she hit the stow button and dropped the gun in his lap while it was still collapsing in on itself. "We can't let these mercenaries move their op somewhere else."

She ignored that Conrad had gone ghostly white as she hopped into the driver's seat and brought the clamshell door slamming down, physically overpowering the hydraulics meant to keep it from falling on unsuspecting passengers. "EDI, please tell me there's a back way onto that dock."

"Yes, Commander, please proceed to the location I have marked on your visor's HUD."

A little directional blip appeared, superimposed over Frankie's view of the dashboard. "EDI, I could kiss you," she replied gratefully.

"That is unnecessary. Moreover, it would be physically impossible."

"I'll just lick one of your server towers in the back of the medbay."

There was a brief pause before EDI responded, "Please do not do that."

"Buzzkill," Shepard muttered under her breath as she piloted the car into the sky and flew towards the spaceport proper.

"Who are you talking to?" Conrad asked. He gulped when the car suddenly lost altitude, because Frankie preferred not to smash into the broad side of a cargo truck.

"My super advanced VI," she answered, figuring it was better that Conrad Verner in particular didn't know about the AI she flew around inside of every day.

"You talk to a computer like that?"

"I talk to everyone like that."

"Not me- Building! Building!BUILDING!" Conrad shouted, pointing urgently as he made a valiant attempt to merge his physical being with the seat.

Frankie gunned the starboard thrusters, the car swung wide until she was flying parallel with the building with only inches of clearance to spare. "That's because you're the most aggravating person I've ever met," she responded to his complaint about her treatment of him, and then punched the thrusters again to drift around the corner of the building. Two seconds more and she dropped the car, decelerating suddenly.

Conrad's hands flew to the grip-bar above him. "Oh my God!" he shrieked. It took him a good breath or two, but he regained his composure around the time the car landed on a glorified patio. The perfect place for cargo port employees to take a smoke break while corporate Nos Astra sucked the life out of them little by little. "Doesn't this thing have inertial dampeners?"

A wicked grin curled at Frankie's mouth. "Turned them off," she answered matter-of-factly and winked.

"Why would you do that?" he sputtered. He was looking at satisfying shade of green.

"The real Commander Shepard experience comes with a pants-shittingly terrifying vehicle ride," she explained as though she hadn't driven like that specifically to scare him. Okay, so she was definitely just being mean now, but if she didn't fuck with him a little, she was just going to strangle him.

Who would help her hide the body if she did? Zaeed almost definitely would, and Thane had to have a hookup for convenient body disposal. Miranda was kind of scary, she'd have ideas about how to do it the right way, too.

You could never have enough scary, competent friends in your back pocket.

"Shepard?"

Frankie shook her head, breaking out of that twisted little reverie. "Alright, Verner, this is how this is going to work," she started as she exited the skycar as though she hadn't just taken it on the galaxy's most dangerous roller coaster ride. "You stay behind me. If shooting's happening, you stay in cover. Do not shoot if no one is already shooting. Do not shoot if you don't know exactly where I am. And most importantly, do not, under any circumstances, fucking shoot me."

Conrad stumbled out of the skycar, wobbling a bit as his body re-acclimated to being on solid ground. "You got it, but what happens if we get separated?"

Shepard tapped Pitne For's building pass to the badge reader. The light turned red and beeped. She tried the door anyway, nothing. She tried again. Red light. Beep. The door rattled against its hinges as she yanked on it desperately.

With a huff, she busied herself hacking the employee badge reader to gain entrance to the cargo port, since that useless volus's building pass wasn't fucking working. "Conrad, if we get separated, I want you to take it as a sign from God that you should go home," she answered eventually with a not undue amount of exasperation.

"Oh," he said quietly. She could hear him looking like a sad, wet dog behind her. "You believe in God?" he asked, switching tack to draw her away from her persistent need to snipe at him probably.

Frankie closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. "No, Conrad. If God was real, I wouldn't be here with you. If he were real, I'd be three double shots of tequila in, dancing with a woman so beautiful it'd make you cry."

"Oh."

Conrad was as good as his word, and diligently stayed out of the way as Frankie slowly worked their way through throngs of Eclipse C-or-maybe-even-as-bad-as-F-Team mercs and those shitty security mechs. He even managed to stop whimpering when the gun battle grew too loud and took a mech or two out himself. It was all going surprisingly well, but there was always a new hitch in the plan.

This hitch came with blue skin and a gun poorly hidden behind her back. The asari mercenary wore her best pleading look, beautiful eyes widened and lips slightly pursed.

Shepard was unimpressed. "You said your name was Elnora, right?" Frankie asked, and as the mercenary nodded, she raised her pistol. "You must think I'm the dumbest motherfucker alive, Elnora."

"Screw th-"

BLAM

Smoke curled from the barrel of Frankie's gun as the asari fell to the ground, limp, and very, extremely, super dead.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Frankie stuck her pinky in her ear and wiggled it around to try to get rid of the shrill sound of helium escaping a balloon, but it continued unabated. Her concussive dampener implant must have been on the fritz if one pistol round was enough to trigger ye olde tinnitus.

"EEEEEeeeeeeeeeuuuugggghh."

Oh, the sound was coming out of Conrad.

She twisted to look behind at the man, who was staring at the sack of bones and meat wrapped in a yellow shell on the ground. "You didn't get hit by a ricochet, did you?" That seemed very unlikely given the caliber of her weapon, the angle, and all of the various laws of physics at play.

His eyes snapped up to her, shock and horror written across his face as plain as if she'd gone over there with a marker and wrote "WHAT THE FUCK?!" on his forehead herself. "Why did you do that? She was just a scared young woman!" he finally remembered what language was and blurted out.

"Eclipse mercenaries have to kill someone to earn that armor. She was pretending." Frankie shrugged and holstered her pistol. "And besides, she was holding that gun behind her back like she was hiding crossed fingers. She was planning to shoot us the whole time."

"You couldn't possibly know that!"

"No, you couldn't possibly know that. I have more information than you," Frankie argued. She thought about telling him not to second guess her like that, but then she remembered that this whole endeavor was so he would stop fucking trying to be like her, or be her, or be inside of her - whatever his actual motivations were. Being horrified at her summary execution of a mercenary was a step in the right direction.

And probably more fodder for her own trip to a psychologist.

It was hard to describe the smell in the air after a mass effect core detonation. Ozone tang, burning electronics, and ... buttery popcorn? No, that wasn't quite right, but it was close.

The gunship's dark metal panels bent inwards before bursting outwards as though it had detonated underwater. A great ball of fire consumed what was left of it, filling the sky with bright light and a mushroom made of smoke. She'd blown up enough of the damn things by now that she had it down to a science. It was all endurance and making sure you didn't let it turn you into Swiss cheese before you turned it into a falling ball of flames.

Frankie sniffed and reholstered her missile launcher. Now, to find her shadow.

He was exactly where she'd left him.

"How ya doin' little buddy?" Frankie nudged Conrad with her foot. He was still sitting on the ground, back against a wall, with both hands wrapped around his rifle like it was the only thing that would keep him from getting ripped away in a tornado.

He didn't look up, only straight ahead. He mumbled something completely unintelligible.

Frankie crouched in front of him and snapped her fingers, "Frankie to Conrad, anyone at the helm?" He stared right through her, trembling and sweating.

Shepard considered her options. She couldn't just leave him here and forge ahead on her own. Well, she could but it would be irresponsible to leave him alone in this state, especially if more Eclipse might come. And this shock business might become a medical emergency, besides.

She could hit him, which was certainly very tempting. But she figured experiencing a real combat zone and a gunship assault as an untrained civilian was more than punishment enough for potentially ruining her mission. And she wasn't that cruel.

Just close to that cruel.

Frankie sighed. She was really going to do this.

She started to lean in and -

No, no. Nope. She pulled away, about to just stand up and leave. She was just going to leave him here and have EDI call for a medevac.

Conrad whimpered.

Oh, goddammit.

Frankie reached forward, grabbed his gorget again and pulled Conrad towards her. She crushed her lips against his and cupped his cheek in her free hand.

Conrad's eyes widened and he gasped relaxing towards her once he figured out that he wasn't in danger. And better than that, even, the Commander Shepard was kissing him.

He started kissing back.

Nope.

No.

Nuh-fucking-uh.

Frankie took that as her cue to stop and pulled away, letting go of his armor and his face. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Conrad nearly tumbled forward, but managed to use the butt of his rifle for balance, while she set her hands on his shoulders and helped to push him back to a natural sitting position. He looked up at her with the goofiest, sloppiest grin she had ever seen. And she'd looked at herself shit-faced in a mirror. "Wow," he whispered in awe, as if he'd laid eyes on a holy relic.

"You tell anyone that happened, and I'll deny it and then I will hit you the hardest you've ever been hit before. I'm talking hard enough to get your teeth stuck in my knuckles," she threatened. "Wipe that stupid fucking grin off your face, soldier. We're not done here."

Conrad's face fell, anxiety filtered into the thinness of his voice as he said, "Right, we have to find Captain Wasea."

Frankie sighed. "Conrad, is today the first day you've ever seen someone die, much less killed anyone?" she asked, genuinely concerned. She was beginning to feel a bit responsible for his mental well-being. Like perhaps she had not fully considered just how traumatizing being a soldier could be. (She had not.)

"Uuuuuhhhh....." he started to say, but probably couldn't find a way to say, "That's right, Shepard, I have never killed a person before today, and now I've seen several people get blown apart, shot, and one person even melted to the inside of their armor. I think I'm perma-fucked now." without sounding a bit pathetic.

"Right. Let's just ... keep going. Gut feeling says if we don't find Wasea soon, she's going to come find us. It'll be over soon." She offered her hand to Conrad and helped hoist him up to his feet. "You ever faced an asari commando before?"

Stunningly, his eyebrows managed to dip even further in towards the bridge of his nose. She wondered what it would take to turn his face into a black hole of an expression. Would she have to introduce him to a thresher maw to watch his head implode of its own volition? "No?"

She slapped his shoulder. "Oh, goodie. Conrad, it fucking sucks," she said with a paradoxical and irreverent amount of cheer.

Well, the situation they found themselves in was less than ideal, and she had warned him it would suck. Wasea had Conrad Verner (currently as high as a fucking kite in a low grav environment on Minagen X3), held aloft in a biotic stasis field and a gun trained on Frankie's last known position.

"Commander, please help!" Conrad shouted. He hiccuped. "I think I'm going to throw up!"

The asari woman looked up at him with disgust turning her severe mouth at harsh bent angles. "Get any puke on me, human, and I'll pop you like a balloon."

"Shepard!" Conrad shouted more urgently now.

Frankie didn't answer. Infiltration 101, yelling across a warehouse at your teammates reveals your position immediately. She darted around cover and rolled to the next stack of crates she could hide behind like she was the star of Hollywood's next horrible summer blockbuster action vid. Not that anyone could see her, she was cloaked and moving at a snail's pace.

"Come on out, Commander! Don't make me kill this sad creature to get your attention," Wasea taunted.

"Hey! That's not very nice!" Conrad chided.

Ducking low, Frankie worked her way around and up behind the mercenary. And just like a bad movie about assassins, she quickly wrapped her hands around Wasea's chin and forehead and jerked.

CRACK

"Ow! What the fuck?" The asari spun, dropping Conrad like a hot sack in the process. She leveled her gun on Frankie, now fully visible and looking a little sheepish. "Did you just try to break my ne-"

Frankie threw her fist into Wasea's jaw before she could finish. "Shit, that always works in the movies," she griped and shook out her hand. Just as she was about to muse that Thane would have been able to do that maneuver no problem, the asari mercenary levered her own fist right across Shepard's nose.

It was hot, the spray of blood that came just about immediately after the impact, and it felt a bit like she rammed her head into a knobbly rock for the hell of it. The cartilage crumpled and tore away, it was a searing sting, and the bones it was attached to made a horrible noise as they crunched where they shouldn't be able to do that. It made her eyes hurt and water too. In short, it fucking sucked.

"FUCK!" Frankie roared and ducked beneath the next punch the woman threw in her direction as she grabbed at her suddenly misshapen nose. "You bitch!"

Was launching herself full send at an angry biotic commando a good idea? On the list of poor decisions she'd made just in that day alone, it probably only ranked fourth or fifth most stupid, but it was still up there. The words "Monumentally Reckless" flared up in Frankie's mind like a neon bar sign before the little barkeep in her head pulled the metal ball chain cord and turned it off as her body met a biotic gravitational field and got flung backwards somewhere between the speed of sound and light.

Someone said a very undignified, "Ooonnff," as she collided with a stack of crates. It was probably her, but there was no video evidence of such a thing escaping her mouth, so it didn't happen. Frankie rolled and skittered away from a biotic projectile launched somewhere in the vicinity of the exact center of her forehead.

"Where are you going? I'm not done with you yet!" Wasea shouted as Frankie scrambled to get back on her feet. She was about two steps leading up to a jog when blue light wrapped around her feet and pulled her back towards the Eclipse mercenary who was using both arms now to pull Shepard away from her attempted escape. Frankie slipped back into the air, ass-over- ... well, every part of her. As she did a slow somersault through the warehouse, she primed her omnitool and let an incineration charge fly in the general direction she vaguely remembered the enemy combatant being in.

But she was tired. Taking on an entire hive of mercenaries, blowing apart a gunship, and babysitting an adult man was a lot of fucking work. And she might have had a concussion too.

She missed, of course.

"Oh, fuck me," she cursed and crossed her arms, accepting her fate.

So long world. It's been fun but let's not do this again, alright?

Maybe Wasea would do her the favor of throwing her body into some sort of fast acting acid that would render it completely unusable so The Illusive Man couldn't bring her back to life again.

A confusing series of events happened as she opened her mouth to make a last request of the mercenary. A shot fired from an M-300 Claymore shotgun (a sound she knew very well by now thanks to her krogan friend), and real gravity reasserted itself (painfully) over her body and she went crashing down to the ground. She was quite certain she saw an upside down man in a bad replica of N7 armor slap another thermal clip into Wasea's huge fuck off gun and fire another round at the asari body stumbling backwards.

She'd get her eyes and head checked later.

Frankie flipped upright and drew her sidearm. Still seated, and somewhat crumpled, she unloaded a full thermal into Wasea and finished the job before Conrad could remember that he was afraid and not a trained killer.

"Conrad, is she dead?" Frankie asked at a volume more appropriate for being heard on the opposite end of a football field than from about ten feet away.

He looked back at her with a thumbs up. "Yeah, I think - hhrrrrcckkgghh." He leaned over his knees and lost his lunch all over the ground.

Shepard stood up and walked over to help the poor man regain his composure. And kick Wasea once for good measure just in case.

"Sorry," he groaned miserably.

"What for?"

"For puking." He pointed at the mess on the ground.

Frankie shrugged. "I won't tell anyone you did that if you don't. I'm honestly surprised it took you this long."

"Thanks, I guess." He wiped his mouth. "What now?"

"We get this information for Samara, give it to her, and then we go get drunk."

"Is that a good idea? You're bleeding." He surreptitiously rubbed his own nose.

"Oh this? That's nothing." She pressed her fingers against the sides of her nose and straightened it out with a sick crunch. Conrad went a little green, she almost hurled herself from the pain but she shook it off. It wasn't cool to puke on your feet.

Frankie laughed through watering eyes, and a wicked sort of grin spread across her face again. "Getting drunk's only about the seventh or eighth worst idea I've had today, but I think you've earned it."

 

From: Commander Frankie Shepard

To: Conrad Verner

Re: pic from the bar

CONRAD'S FIRST REAL DEAL SPECTRE MISSION.

LOVE FRANKIE ❤️

P.S. - If you ever impersonate me again, I'll fucking kill you.